Stacy Kennelly, "Does Playing Music Boost Kids' Empathy?"

Stacy Kennelly's article, "Does Playing Music Boost Kids' Empathy?" posted in UC Berkeley's Greater Good website, reviews a 2012 quasi-experimental study by Rabinowitch et al, published online in Psychology of Music.  University of Cambridge researchers observed 28 girls and 24 boys, all between the ages of 8 and 11, from four different schools in the United Kingdom with a similar socioeconomic makeup. The researchers designed a year-long Musical Group Interaction (MGI) program incorporating various music games with in-built empathy-promoting musical components (EPMCs). 

All children were administered a variety of pre- and post- tests to gauge their emotional empathy.
Approximately 50% were randomly assigned to the experimental group, which participated in a researcher-designed MGI program.  The experimental group met once a week in small groups for an entire school year to play games that encouraged interaction, imitation, and “mindreading” through music. For example, in the “Mirror Match” game, children had to repeat or match a short piece of music played by another student. In the “Improvising Rhythm” game, the children had to coordinate their playing, even as the rhythm was being constantly changed.  The other 50% also participated in weekly games that encouraged interaction and imitation, but their games were without music, using techniques like storytelling and drama instead.

The study's results: empathy increased significantly among children in the music group.   Researchers postulate that by engaging with musical activities, the experimental group was ‘shared intentionality’: an understanding of each other’s intentions through a common aim or object of attention - creating emotional affinity among the children. The group that had drama and storytelling activities, however, showed no discernable increase in empathy.  Tal-Chen Rabinowitch, a doctoral student at Cambridge’s Center for Music and Science and the lead author of the study, found that result surprising.  She commented, “...we expected the children who participated in the control games group interaction program to also show an enhanced capacity for empathy following the program,” she says.  The increased empathy among children in the music group suggests that interacting through music may hone our general ability to share the psychological states of others.

While the sample size of the University of Cambridge study was small, and therefore no definitive conclusions should be drawn from this single study, the experiment does suggest the empathy-enhancing potential of collaborative music making. More research, involving larger groups of students, is needed to strengthen the link between music and empathy, and to explore the staying power of group music training in regard to empathy.  The researchers also underscored the importance of seeing music--and by extension, the arts as a whole--not simply as skill- or craft-based, but simultaneously providing a vehicle for teaching social interaction.  And of course, it would be important to examine the drama/storytelling curriculum, seeing whether the materials used in the games incorporated comparable empathy-producing elements to those in the music-based curriculum.